“Time is what stops everything from happening at once. » This quote, often attributed to Einstein, is actually uttered by many physicists and writers – the oldest confirmed being Ray Cummings in a short story. However, Dickens' novels redefined the interpretation of this quote by allowing characters to (attempt to) manipulate and condense time and recognize it in atypical ways. While many of Dickens's characters obsessively check their pocket watches, deliberately tracking the passage of time and feeling the need to move forward, characters such as Miss Havisham, Mrs. Clennam, and Mrs. Skewton function as key points that avoid this desire to always move forward. the passage of time – these women strive to maintain stasis, manipulating time as a metaphor for a disappointed future, marked by rot and decadence. This stasis only disintegrates once these women are removed from the domains they control. Time serves in Dickens as a controlled function that is not only arrested by the aforementioned characters, but becomes their development entirely arrested in their ruin. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay In Great Expectations, Miss Havisham openly attempts to freeze time in her bleak and deliberately unchanging house. This attempt at temporal manipulation says a lot about her character, portraying her as an already-dead specter locked in her grave until she dies. Unlike other characters who are always in motion and express an urgency in relation to time, Miss Havisham approaches temporality with a kind of dread and prefers to suspend her life in a single moment that changes her life. Miss Havisham says in one passage: "On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of rot," stabbing with her crutch at the pile of cobwebs on the table but not touching it, "was brought here . He and I wore out together. Mice gnawed it, and teeth sharper than mice gnawed me. ("Great" 89) She refers to the "heap of decay" as having arrived at her home many years ago, and although this seems insignificant, the fact that she mentions this implies that this old age, decay and Decay have always been the way they are – temporally trapped in their existence and will continue to exist in that state. Old age has always been old, or at least Miss Havisham thinks it always has been, and it seems that this translates into the belief that she has always been stuck in this moment and always will be. Miss Havisham also makes a strange acknowledgment of time in this passage by saying that "he and I have worn out together." You have to have spent time for anything to wear out, and this is made even more complicated by his previous line about the pile of decadence that seems to have always existed. Miss Havisham is therefore completely aware of time and its passage, which leads one to believe that she is deliberately manipulating time to make it a metaphor for the future she will never have and that she prefers to be essentially a woman pitiful destroyed by her past. or what became his perpetual gift). It is also significant to note the day and time that Miss Havisham attempted to temporarily trap her house. Time stops on her birthday, which is usually celebrated as the beginning of time, but Miss Havisham hates this day. Although it is the only day she has guests, none of them are allowed to mention that it is her birthday, and she explicitly mentions it when she says "they come here that day, but they dare not refer to it” (“Super” 89). Furthermore, her birthday is also her (will be) wedding day, and yet every clock is stopped at twenty minutes to nine in a strange stasis of the moment her future husband abandoned her. She remains confined to a moment of despair, refusing to move forward, either in fear of the future or in an attempt to remember the pain of the past, and she hasn't even bothered to change her clothes. wedding. She has, in a sense, dedicated herself to this pivotal moment in her life by never leaving it, and as she seems to believe that the house and its objects have always been obsolete, she has convinced herself that her life is destined to be frozen in time forever. To bring the significance of this particular day full circle, Miss Havisham is determined to die on this day as well. She said to Pip: "When the ruin is complete... and they put me dead, in my wedding dress, on the bride's table - which will be done, and it will be the curse completed on him - so much the better if this is done. that day! (“Great” 89). What is strange though is that she uses the word "complete" as if there is a process to this forced stasis that must run its course, which could imply that she recognizes the futility of truly manipulating the time, but stubbornly refuses to move on to make his point. . It's also interesting that she uses the phrase "curse on him" because, in her attempt at temporal manipulation, she seems to be the one under a curse, and it's a curse inflicted on her by her own hand. However, through it all, her birth/death cycle will consist of her own imprisonment in the moment that changed her life - conveying the idea that she was literally born and will die for this prolonged moment of torture. In relation to physical temporality, Miss Havisham's manipulation of time is similar to that of a black hole as her internal condensation of time into a single instant has extended to House Satis itself. In Pip's description of the house, he observes: "The dull old house was so unchanging, the yellow light in the dark room, the faded specter in the chair by the dressing-table window, that I had the impression that the clocks had stopped. Time stopped in this mysterious place, and as I and everything outside grew old, it stopped. Daylight never entered the house as to my thoughts and memories, nor to the actual fact. (“Great” 125) First of all, it is important to note that “wraith” is Miss Havisham's descriptor, describing her as a ghost – something already dead and literally temporally locked in time, unchanging in its environment or in his graves (whether real graves or tombs). Satis House). It should also be noted that "Time" is capitalized as if it were a named person who can be controlled in the same way that Miss Havisham controls and manipulates Estella. Time is therefore not just the metaphor for Miss Havisham's unhappiness, but simply a tool she uses to perpetuate the pain of the past and saturate the present (and future) with it. Grammatically, "and" is deleted in the first sentence of the aforementioned passage, making it more direct and everything being equal to the moment of time elapsed, and the phrase "Time... stopped" is a dead metaphor, generating a parallel perfect in the context of Miss Havisham and Satis House seemingly dead. Mass and gravity have a direct relationship, and that relationship is that the more mass an object has, the greater its gravitational force will be. Since black holes have a huge amount of mass andgravity, time essentially slows down to a stop near a black hole. To an observer outside the black hole, time would be stopped, and in this case Miss Havisham would be the singularity causing this with her mass of bridal clothes, piles of disrepair and grand house. With all her accumulated mass and unwavering density of vengeful betrayal, Miss Havisham creates her own strange gravity, allowing her to control time and space similar to that of a black hole. According to the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “Einstein's theory of gravity seems to predict that time itself is destroyed at the center of the hole: time ends abruptly there. For this reason, a black hole is sometimes described as "the reverse of creation." The reverse of creation lies in both its manipulation of time, stopping it completely, as well as its emotional dismantling of others characters (e.g. Pip) through his controlled use of Estella. It is also worth noting that daylight never entered the house, as Pip mentions, and, to an outside observer, light never appears to enter or exist in a black hole either. “Daylight never entered” Satis House, and Miss Havisham locked herself in a tomb-like room, and it is in this tomb that she eventually meets her demise. Even in his death, there is a kind of stratification of time in the healing of the wounds. Pip relates: “Although every vestige of her dress was burned, as they told me, she still had something of her horrible bridal appearance; for they had covered her up to the neck with white cotton, and as she lay with a white sheet lightly over it, the ghostly air of something that had been and was being changed was still upon her” (“Big” 403). Even in all of Pip's visions showing her hanging from a beam – literally hanging in a moment of ruin – she is imprisoned by her own will and by the manipulation of time and space, she is perpetually in death. Speaking of injuries, literal injuries that are missing. Havisham gains a reflection of his internal and emotional wounds in the end from the past wrongs done to him. Martin Price says in a chapter entitled “Dickens: Selves and Systems” of his book that: Miss Havisham was cruelly wronged, although the event was partly created by her own will; what is more important is what she did with her suffering. She stops time to live in a constant state of betrayal; she loves her wounds too much to let them heal. Furthermore, she makes Estella her instrument to repeat evil again and again to the detriment of others' feelings. She transformed her suffering into a cycle where one wrong avenges another; and it never occurs to him that Estella might feel anything other than gratification as she keeps the cycle going. (Price 118) The event “created by her own will” recalls the curse she supposedly placed that actually became a curse on herself and others. This becomes complicated because, even though she is in temporal stasis, the cycle of revenge continues because of this – an extension of Miss Havisham's favorite temporal binding into vanity and despair. This cyclical behavior fits well with Peter Brooks's discussion of the return of the repressed, which will be addressed in the following paragraphs. Price also remarks to Pip about Miss Havisham while she is on her deathbed, having been consumed by fire (note also that black holes are theoretically extremely hot because of their axial rotation speeds) : And could I look at her without compassion, seeing herpunishment in the ruin that she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of pain which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of indignity , and other monstrous vanities which have been curses in this world? (“Great” 399) Besides being a revealing thought on Pip's part, there are many fascinating things in this passage. Firstly, it resonates well with characters in other Dickens novels who also exemplify extreme vanity, and this appears to be the first time that Miss Havisham's behavior is explicitly described in relation to vanity – thus narrowing the scope of her actions to an intrinsic reaction that many women have. those who were wronged in Dickens's novels demonstrate this. Besides Miss Havisham, there is another impressionable character in Dickens's novels who attempts to manipulate time by stopping it or perhaps even reversing it out of distorted vanity. In Dombey and Son, Mrs. Skewton, aka Cleopatra, goes to great lengths to appear young even though she is aging miserably. She actively tries to stop time from moving forward in her desire to stay hanging on a date before time becomes merciless and figure to her, and this old crone's vanity is emphasized throughout the novel and especially during from his introduction: The difference between the new enthusiasm of Mrs. Skewton's words and her sadly faded manner, was scarcely less observable than that between her age, which was about seventy years, and her dress, which would have been young for twenty-seven years. Her attitude in the wheelchair (which she never changed) was that in which she had been taken in a carriage, some fifty years before, by a then fashionable artist who had added to his published sketch the name of Cleopatra: as a result of a discovery made by critics of the time, that she looked exactly like this princess lying on board her galley. Mrs. Skewton was then a beauty, and the males threw wine glasses over their heads by the dozen in her honor. The beauty and the carriage had both died, but she still retained the attitude, and for this express reason, held the wheelchair and the stumbling page: nothing, except the attitude, prevented her from walking. (“Dombey” 319) This overly elaborate description of Mrs. Skewton fits well with her vanity, her obsessive desire to control time as it relates to herself. Another character (who will be discussed in more detail later) is Mrs. Clennam, whose distorted vanity leaves her determined to take revenge on those who have wronged her in the past, while being temporarily imprisoned in her room. Second, in the passage about Miss Havisham, calling Miss Havisham a ruin reiterates the connection between her house and self – the house in ruins (the ruin as a metaphor for arrested development) is an extension of Miss Havisham and the Time (a metaphor for 'a disappointed future) that she controls. This also begins to raise the question of whether the house is actually a ruin when trapped in time or when it is a literal ruin, and the answer seems to be that it is both the temporal ruin frozen in time. time and ruin frozen in time. this happens at the end of the novel when the house is allowed to catch up with real time and collapses. Third, Pip's mention that Miss Havisham is "profoundly unsuitable for this Earth" resembles the idea that Miss Havisham behaves like a black hole - another thing profoundly unfit for Earth that would eventually destroy it if it found it too close. It is also strange that Pip mentions that Miss Havisham was "placed" on the earth, whichwhich might suggest that this is another (or the very first) wrong committed against Miss Havisham. “Placed” implies that it was not necessarily her will or wish to exist on earth when she is fit to live elsewhere. Fourth, the aforementioned irony of Miss Havisham's "curse" returns here in the conversation, as Pip clearly realizes that the curse Miss Havisham has cast is actually on herself in the form of vanity and , like a black hole, it is a “monstrous”. one that affects everything it comes into contact with, especially Pip and Estella. The name of the house, Satis House, which translates to “enough house,” is also deeply meaningful. Satis is a play on multiple words, and the first that comes to mind is stasis which implies that the house is frozen temporally as well as physically in its immobility from the moment it is perpetually suspended, and this refers directly to another interpretation , stagnant. , implying the same thing while conveying the connotation that the house is deteriorating and festering in Miss Havisham's languor. Another play on the house name is "status", which might indirectly imply the societal need to maintain high esteem from society, and this pulls in the direction of the other interpretation of satis, i.e. "satisfaction", which seems more ironic than anything else because Miss Havisham is far from satisfied. Or perhaps, in a masochistic way, she takes great satisfaction in making a strange statement by keeping her house temporarily blocked off, even as the outside world continues to change and move while she attempts to stay in a single moment. With the stasis of the house, it becomes understandable that a character such as Miss Havisham may have a satisfying house that she can control, but she may not have a time or length of time satisfactory, which she cannot control despite all attempts. In Brooks' article "Repetition, Repression, and Return: Great Expectations and the Study of Plot", he discusses the cyclical return of the repressed throughout the novel, generally as it relates to Pip, but also paying special attention to Miss Havisham and Satis House. He says: “The madness and morbidity of Satis House are based on a fixed desire that has become sadistic, on a deviated eroticism that has literally shut out the light, stopped the clocks and made the advancement of the plot impossible” (Brooks 508) . The return of the repressed for Miss Havisham is held hostage in its temporal manipulation and is complicated by its manifestation in the form of stasis – it is a continuous return of the repressed, a return which could perhaps be described as condensed into suspension like that of a black hole. , whose power extends beyond herself (or Miss Havisham) and affects everything around her (Satis House herself, Pip, Estella, etc.). It appears there will be no resolution to this repression, as Brooks talks about it, conspiracies are usually researched, and Miss Havisham's past is very much unrepressed as she actively chooses to live there, conscious of time while rejecting it. The only way to get closure or resolution of any kind in his case is through death. Brooks indirectly addresses this notion of his death as a resolution of this stasis also when he says that the novel, towards its end, records a generalized distribution of plots: none of the plans hatched by the characters seem to achieve their objectives. The contrario evidence could be the "too successful" result of Miss Havisham's plot, which has made Estella such a heartless creature that she cannot even feel emotional gratitude towards her benefactress. His plot was a mechanical success but aintentional failure. (Brooks 520) The collapse of the plot as well as the literal collapse of Satis House is accompanied by the death of Miss Havisham, and even Estella at the end of the novel seems to have the potential for some sort of change once that she is freed from the gravitational and manipulative world. understanding of Miss Havisham, particularly during her last meeting with Pip, implying that there could be a potential friendship or relationship. It is therefore important to focus on Miss Havisham's final words and her death, as it is the dismantling of her manipulated stasis. Around midnight, she began to wander in her speech, and after that, she gradually said countless times in her speech. a low and solemn voice: “What have I done! And then: “When she arrived, I intended to save her from misery like mine. » And then: “Take the pencil and write under my name: “I forgive him! » She never changed the order of these three sentences, but she sometimes omitted a word in one or the other of them; never add another word, but always leave a blank and move on to the next word. ("Great" 403) Brooks says "The cycle of three statements suggests a metonymy in search of arrest, a plot which can never find a satisfactory resolution, which, unresolved, must play on its insistent repetitions, until let him be silenced by death” (Brooks 520). And it is, indeed, only in death that Satis House is allowed to catch up with real time and collapse, becoming a literal ruin and seeing its many parts sold at auction ("Great" 473). When Miss Havisham's black hole is removed from the house, the stasis disintegrates and resolution and reinitiation into the natural order of time can begin. This stasis is therefore a form of continuous return of the repressed until the condensing repressor is removed from the situation and the disappointed metaphorical future can either be realized or dissolved. Miss Havisham is not the only character who attempts to manipulate time into a fixed metaphor for a disappointed future. Mrs. Clennam from Little Dorrit does exactly the same thing, and her temporal control has also extended to her surroundings and home, affecting other characters such as Affery and Jeremiah Flintwinch, Amy (to an extent), and Arthur . She lives in ruins, confined to a wheelchair in an unchanging room, arrested in her development and saturated with the vanity of her own vengeance for the wrongs done to her. Confined as such, her stasis of time seems to be a waiting game suspended for her death (akin to Miss Havisham as she awaits her birth/death/unmarried day) or her revenge perhaps coming true. Similar to Miss Havisham, Mrs. Clennam is fully aware of the passage of time but recognizes that time stops for her in her conscious, mummified state. In a conversation about the seasons and the passage of time about them, she says: "To me, all seasons are the same...I don't know anything about summer and winter, shut up here." It pleased the Lord to put me beyond all this” (“Little” 49-50). Although she is confined both physically and seemingly temporally, she is aware that time is passing and she maintains that she has neither will nor control over her confined situation, although she appears to be the one truly manipulating the time, space and even people. around her. Mrs. Clennam explicitly frames her situation as imprisonment as well, but she almost seems content with it as a means of "not forgetting," which she might otherwise do if she were not physically and temporally bound to her room. This complicates her situation in the same way, Miss Havisham's situation is complicated and presentalso great similarities with the character of Miss Havisham. The fact that Miss Havisham forces the clocks to stop at a certain time, remaining in her wedding dress, leaving all the amenities of a wedding like the cake and the bride's table, and her desire to die that day- there also implies that she fully intends to do so. to “not forget” the pivotal moment in her life from which she claims she cannot turn the page. Mrs. Clennam, meanwhile, is also trapped in a tomb room, ignoring the seasons and changes in the outside world while continually looking at the watch near her on the table in an effort not to forget. Both women then actively choose to manipulate their world into stasis, recognizing that time exists and passes, but choosing to remain suspended in their ruin, vengeance, and vanity-filled pursuits of making others suffer for the wrongs that were committed. to them. Martin Price points out that “the cessation of movement, of action, of the mind appears throughout the novel of Little Dorrit,” and this includes Mrs. Clennam’s “denial of time” (Price 131). Although she denies time when she considers the play and the unchanging seasons, her phrase “Do not forget” is a suspension of time that evades real time in favor of a continued stay in time in stasis. She said, “Don’t forget. » It spoke to me like a voice coming from an angry cloud. Don't forget mortal sin, don't forget the appointed discovery, don't forget the appointed suffering. I haven't forgotten. Was it my mistake that I remembered? Mine! I was only a servant and a minister” (“Little” 808). In the same way that Miss Havisham does not forget her past, Mrs. Clennam does exactly the same thing, perhaps more explicitly. These women revel in the stasis of their own misery, freezing time so as to “not forget” the transgressions against them. Miss Wade is also an example of a Dickensian woman who refuses to forget her past and the wrongs done to her, taking revenge on everyone and affecting her surroundings. Additionally, Mrs. Clennam shares other qualities with Miss Wade and Miss Havisham. Price says, “The main contrast to “arrest” is growth toward flourishing. The vitality of normal growth is so energetic that arrest must become an intense pressure, a violence committed against oneself or others” (Price 132). We see this in Miss Havisham, Mrs Clennam, Mrs Skewton and even (now) Miss Wade. Price goes on to say that Miss Wade has "learned to interpret every experience as a grievance" and that Mrs. Clennam thrives on self-punishment which has "created a 'monstrous idol' of her 'vindictive pride and rage' ”, giving their manipulated stasis a strange futility as they have essentially transformed themselves into martyrs (Price 132). Price also notes that "both women cling to their wrongs, Mrs. Clennam in severe self-punishment, Miss Wade in bitter retaliation." Neither can abandon her torment” (Price 132). Like Miss Havisham, these women seem particularly attached to the idea of ​​suspending themselves in their wrongs, of stopping time itself to stay there, and it seems that all of these women, and not just Miss Havisham, have inflicted upon themselves a curse – a curse that seems to bind itself tightly to some kind of distorted conceit until something moves and the temporal structure can dissolve into a resolution. However, it might seem that Miss Wade never gives up on her vengeance and remains in stasis, doomed to be stuck in the cycle of "the return of the repressed" forever, but Tattycoram seems to resolve this problem as Tattycoram exhibits similar feelings to those of Miss Wadetowards the Meagles – a kind of unbearable resentment towards them. In Miss Wade's realm of vengeful stasis (or on the threshold of her theoretical black hole), Miss Wade can manipulate ("missuade") Tattycoram (Tatty even admits this once she joins the Meagles), but once that Tattycoram finds the courage to escape. Under the influence of Miss Wade, the vengeance exercised on the Meagles and on Tattycoram dissolves. While it may be upsetting to modern readers that Tatty returns to the Meagles because of their (mis)treatment of her, it reinforces the continuing pattern of Dickensian women who function as manipulative black holes, arrested in their own development and disappointed by their future based on the future. about the wrongs of the past Also similar to Miss Havisham, Mrs. Clennam's time stop disintegrates once she, the manipulator of this time binding, is removed from the house itself. “Before her ghostly figure, so long unaccustomed to her erect attitude and so stiff within her, Rigaud fell back and lowered his voice. It was, for all three, almost as if a dead woman had been resurrected” (“Little” 817). The description of Mrs. Clennam as being like a ghost or dead woman is similar to Miss Havisham being described as a "spectre" (in fact, Mrs. Clennam is also described as a "spectral woman" on page 819). Both women are buried in a stasis that extends even to their surroundings, and it is in the moments when they become most alive that this stasis disintegrates. When Mrs. Clennam returned to her house, it "heaved itself up, jumped out, opened in fifty places, collapsed and fell," and Mrs. Clennam "fell on the stones; and from that hour she never moved so much as a finger, nor had the power to utter a single word,” noting that “she lived and died as a statue” ( “Small” 827). Price also notes this moment, saying that once Mrs. Clennam gives up her repeated torments/stasis, "her house collapses as if it had been the edifice of her will, and she survives it in only three years of paralysis and “rigid silence””. (Price 132). By relinquishing her vain vengeance and temporal hold on the house (and herself), real time can catch up with the two, eventually forcing them to collapse and give up on existence. It is also useful to note other versions of women's arrested development found in Dickens's novels. , although they do not have the black hole power that other female characters, such as Miss Havisham, Miss Wade, and Mrs. Clennam possess. These characters seemingly have no control over their stasis and are unwittingly temporarily imprisoned. One such character, and perhaps the most notable for this example, is Maggie from Little Dorrit. Little Dorrit tells Arthur Maggie's disastrous story, recounting "When Maggie was ten years old...she had a high fever, sir, and she has never aged since" ("Little" 116). Maggie even nods in agreement, sincerely believing that she is only ten when her real age is 28. Interestingly though, although Maggie is temporarily trapped at age ten, she seems to be the character least concerned with time. . She is unwittingly governed by the stasis of her existence, but she pays no attention to the racing world around her while other characters are constantly and willingly made aware (either by others or by themselves). ) of time and its passage. Another character who exemplifies a unique form of arrested development is Flora Finching, who is apparently temporarily imprisoned twenty years ago while 519).